 Section 10 of Rational Theology and Christian Philosophy, Volume 2 by John Tulloch. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 4 Ralph Cudworth Christian Philosophy in Conflict with Materialism, Part 1. 1. Cudworth is the most celebrated of the Cambridge School, and at the same time its most systematic and formal writer. The movement takes in him its most elaborate and complete expression. He was born a year before John Smith and entered Emanuel College a few years earlier. The son of a clergyman of some distinction and learning, he enjoyed advantages which the son of a small farmer in Northamptonshire could scarcely have done and had thus the start of his contemporary at the university and all along his academic course. He attained his master's degree five years earlier and immediately after became fellow and tutor of his college with a large circle of pupils, as many as eight and twenty, in instance scarce ever known before even in the largest colleges of the university. Footnote An account of the life and writings of Ralph Cudworth, D.D., by Thomas Birch, M.A.F.R.S. To this very fragmentary and imperfect account, commonly prefixed to the additions of Cudworth's intellectual system, etc., we are indebted for almost all we know of his life. End of footnote It is very probable, therefore, that Smith was one of Cudworth's pupils, although the fact is not mentioned in any scanty notices we have of the life of either. Between them may be traced not merely the common type of mind belonging to the members of the school, but certain special affinities and ways of looking at the religious questions of their time. This is especially true of the earlier and more generalized phase of Cudworth's thought, which may be said to represent the period of his connection with a manual college. A special bond of association between these illustrious students is all the more likely when we remember that Whitchcote, the lifelong friend of Cudworth, was the patron and friend of the young student from Northamptonshire. Ralph Cudworth was born at Aller in Somersetshire in 1617. His father, like himself, had been bred at Emmanuel College and afterwards became minister of St. Andrew's Church in Cambridge. He was finally rector of Aller and appears to have died young. His widow, whose family name was Machel, and who had been nursed to Prince Henry, the eldest son of King James, married a second time Dr. Stoughton, who educated his son-in-law, the subject of our notice, with great care. To this careful training he owed his early advantages and the rapid progress which he made at Cambridge. When admitted in 1630, a pensioner in Emmanuel College, he was only thirteen years of age, and his father-in-law gave him this testimony that he was as well grounded in school learning as any boy of his age that went to the university. Even thus early on the books of Emmanuel he did not matriculate till two years afterwards in 1632, when he commenced his academic career with great enthusiasm and applied himself to all parts of literature with such vigor that he became master of arts at the age of twenty-two with great applause. His distinguished career as a tutor immediately followed. Among his pupils was the well-known Sir William Temple, whose subsequent reputation as an ambassador, politician, and writer has impressed this fact upon his biographer. There is no evidence, however, that Temple was any credit to his tutor. On the contrary, his university course seems to have been rather idle, and he left Cambridge after two years without taking a degree. While tutor in his college, Cudworth was presented to the Rectory of North Cadbury in summer such year. This living was in the gift of Emmanuel College, and we find which coat presented to it in 1643. Cudworth appears to have been his immediate predecessor for about two years. He is said to have been appointed in 1641, but there is some doubt whether he ever left the university and settled in the country. His first authorship belongs to this period. In 1642 he published a discourse concerning the true nature of the Lord's Supper. It does not appear whether this discourse was ever delivered. It could scarcely have been a sermon from the elaborate and highly scholastic manner in which it is constructed. It is composed of an introduction and six chapters in which the author expounds, with learned discursiveness, the relation of the Lord's Supper to the sacrificial customs of the Jews and heathens, and tries to discriminate its true meaning as illustrated by these customs. Like most of his subsequent writings, it is overlaid by masses of rabbinical, patristic, and classical quotation, which often carry him away from the subject instead of serving to explain it. Bochart, Spencer, and Seldon are said to have greatly admired it, and Warburton, my most ingenious and learned friend, says Birch, styled it in a letter to him, a masterpiece of its kind. It was published along with another kindred production of his pen at this time, with only his initials RC. Spencer was devoted to the same kind of erudition. He was the author of a once-celebrated work De Legibus Hiberrorum Ritualibus at Eiarum Ritionibus Libri Trace. Like Cudworth he was educated at Cambridge, 1645 to 1655, and was for a brief space, Master of Corpus, in the chapel of which he is interred. He was afterwards Dean of Ely. Sir William Hamilton mentions Spencer along with Smith, Cudworth, Moore, and Taylor as forming, quote, the illustrious and congenial band by which the University of Cambridge was illustrated during the last half of the seventeenth century, close quote. Spencer's breadth of mind displayed in his conduct to the nonconformists after the restoration, as well as in many of his rational explanations of the Jewish rites and customs, entitled him to be remembered in connection with the Cambridge school. But he does not seem to have entered much, if at all, into its philosophical aims, and his writings are now forgotten. Taylor had no connection with Cambridge in the latter part of the seventeenth century, nor apparently after leaving it so early as 1636. Mochart was a Protestant pastor at Caen, where he died suddenly in 1667. His extensive erudition in biblical antiquities, geography, and natural history was the wonder of his age. And footnote. The idea or true notion of the Lord's Supper, according to Cudworth, is that it is a feast upon sacrifice, an epulom sacrificiale, or epulom ex oblates, analogous to the feasts which followed upon the legal sacrifices among the Jews. The legal sacrifices, being only types and shadows, were often, quote, repeated and renewed, as well as the feasts which were made upon them. But now the true Christian sacrifice being come, and offered up once for all never to be repeated. We have therefore no more typical sacrifices left among us, but only the feasts upon the true sacrifice, still symbolically continued, and often repeated, in reference to that one great sacrifice, which is always as present in God's sight and efficacious as if it were but now offered up for us. Close quote. In this view he sees a solution of the controversy as to whether the Lord's Supper itself be a sacrifice. It is not sacrifcium, but in Tertullian's language participatio sacrificii. Quote, not the offering of something up to God upon an altar, but the eating of something which comes from God's altar and is set upon our tables. This is the key to the Apostles' meaning in the passage, 1 Corinthians 10-21, you cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of devils. You cannot be partakers of the Lord's table and of the table of devils. The things which the Gentiles sacrificed, they sacrificed to devils, and so the feasts which followed were called the feasts of devils, and to share in those feasts was really to be partakers of the idle sacrifices. No Christian could consistently join in those feasts. In like manner they who partook of the legal sacrifices were sharers of those sacrifices. It is the same analogy which gives us the true explanation of the Lord's Supper. They who join in it participate in the sacrifice of the cross. The right itself is not sacrificial, but it derives all its special meaning and virtue from the great sacrifice which it commemorates. The communion table is not an altar, but it points back to one. It is wrong to call it an altar because this implies a place upon which God himself, so to speak, eats, consuming the sacrifice by his holy fire, whereas the true idea is that God in the Holy Supper gives us meat to eat of. In short, there may be said to be, quote, a sacrifice in the Lord's Supper symbolically, but not there as offered up to God, but feasted on by us, and so not a sacrifice, but a sacrificial feast, which began too soon to be misunderstood, close quote. This bare abstract of Cudworth's argument is sufficient to show the bread that compassed both of his religious and philosophical conceptions at this early age. He was as yet only twenty-three. It indicates moreover his capacity of carrying controversy back to its first principles and disentangling the truth and error generally to be found on both sides of a great question. This eclectic healthfulness of spirit is particularly noticeable in the introduction. The discourse itself and the profusion of erudite illustrations from Maimonides, Jim Chi, and other Jewish writers, which illustrate it, are more like his time and a theological manner which was beginning to disappear. The following may be taken as a specimen of its higher thoughtfulness, quote, All great errors have ever been intermingled with some truth, and indeed, if falsehood should appear alone into the world in her own true shape and native deformity, she would be so black and horrid that no man would look upon her, and therefore she hath always had an art to wrap up herself in a garment of light, by which means she passed freely disguised and undissurbed. This was elegantly signified in the fable, thus. Truth at first presented herself to the world and went about to seek entertainment, but when she found none, being of a generous nature that loves not to obtrude herself upon unworthy spirits, she resolved to leave earth and take her flight for heaven. But as she was going up, she chanced, Elijah-like, to let her mantle fall, and falsehood, waiting by for such an opportunity, snatched it up presently and ever since goes about disguised in truth's attire. Pure falsehood is pure non-entity and could not subsist alone by itself. Therefore it always twines up together about some truth, as Athenagoras, the Christian philosopher, speaks, like an ivy that grows upon some wall, twining herself into it with wanton and flattering embraces, till it have at length destroyed and pulled down that which held it up. There is always some truth which gives being to every error. There is ever some soul of truth which doth secretly spirit and enliven the dead and unwieldy lump of all errors without which it could not move or stir. Though sometimes it would require a very curious artist in the midst of all errors deformities to describe the defaced lineaments of that truth which first it did resemble. There is the same mixture of learning and thoughtfulness in the other publication which belongs to this period of Cudworth's life with less substance, however, in the thought and more irrelevancy in the erudition. It is entitled, The Union of Christ and the Church in a Shadow, and may have been originally a sermon. As in the former production, his aim is to vindicate the true idea of sacrifice in relation to the Lord's Supper, so here it is his aim to restore what he believes to be an important truth from the corruptions with which the Romanists had overlaid it. In the eagerness with which men pass from one extreme to another, the Protestants appear to him to have lost sight of the higher meaning of marriage, that mystical union which is contained in it. Quoting Saint Paul, he argues that the apostle plainly regards the union of man and wife as not only a bare similitude of the mystical union of Christ and his church, in the same manner as the grain of mustard seed, for example, in the Gospels is a similitude of the Kingdom of Heaven. The apostle's thought and the true thought is deeper than this. Quote, he makes one to be a real type of the other and the other an archetypal copy according to which that was limbed and drawn out. As the Platonists used to say concerning spiritual and material things, that material things are but ectypal resemblances and imitations of spiritual things which were the first primitive and archetypal beings. And following out this Platonic conception, he conceives that, quote, God having framed that excellent plot of the Gospel and therein continued the mystical union between Christ and the church, delighted to draw some shadowings and ad-embrations of it here below, and left the seal of that truth upon these material things that so it might print the same stamp and idea though upon baser matter. Close quote. Hence according to him the institution of man and wife wherein we see not only an accidental likeness, but a true picture of the relation betwixt Christ and his church. The lower relation not merely serves to illustrate the higher, but is its divinely constituted image or copy. Christ and the church being sponsors at Sponsa Architipi, man and wife being sponsors at Sponsa Ectipi. He expounds this thought under several heads and heaps around it a multiplicity of quotations from diverse mystical authorities, amongst others from the masters of the Kabbalah, a kind of secret and mystical divinity, he says, remaining in part yet amongst the Jews. It is unnecessary to follow his details curious as some of them are. They add little or nothing to the sum of his thought expressed in the opening of the tract, much as they serve to show the unusual range of his speculation and reading. Even at this early age, Cudworth had evidently mastered all the main sources of philosophy, medieval as well as classical. Like Smith he quotes freely not only from the Neoplatonists and the Jewish schools, but also from such modern revivers of the Platonic spirit as Pico of Mirandola and Ludovicus Vives. Footnote. John Lewis, commonly called Ludovicus Vives, was born at Valencia, 1492. He was an intimate friend of Erasmus and spent a considerable portion of his life as his friend did in England in the reign of Henry VIII. He was the author of various philosophical works, all more or less directed against the scholastic philosophy which attracted much attention in their day. And a footnote. His own thought is in fact buried amidst the mass of philosophical antiquarianism in which he sets it. He draws at will from the most various and recondite authorities. We are pleased also to light upon an allusion to Bacon, our late noble Viscount of St. Albans, showing that the most recent, no less than the most ancient philosophical writings were known to so omnivorous a student. In all there is observed an ardent mind insatiably in search of higher knowledge, marvelously elevated and powerful in its range but moving along a transcendental road apt to terminate in cloudland. We see in short something of the strength and weakness of the school in its infancy, its spiritual rationality verging on fantastic mysticism, its noble culture with its uncritical and clumsy deference to authority. The subjects handled in both these early tracks are directly religious, but it is their philosophical more than their religious tendency which interests us. Rather it is the manner in which they apply a philosophical spirit to religious questions. From the first, Cudworth is more or less of a religious philosopher. His mind instinctively seeks the root of religion and morality, their ultimate basis in the laws and principles of human nature. There is some reason for thinking that already before he had quitted the shades of Emmanuel as tutor he had turned his attention to the great topics which were afterwards so much to occupy him. This may be inferred from the theses he maintained two years later, 1644, on taking his degree of bachelor of divinity in which he discussed the nature of good and evil and the existence of incorporeal substances. These theses in Latin verse are found printed in a pamphlet on Free Will published from Cudworth's manuscripts in 1837. They are there dated not 1644 but 1651 when he took his degree of doctor of divinity. Can he have discussed the same subjects twice over? Burch's affirmation is positive in favor of the former date. End of footnote. The natural affinity of his mind was towards such discussions and they may have been the fruit of his own reflectiveness in those studious years, but they may have also been suggested by signs which his eager thoughtfulness discerned in the philosophical atmosphere. Hobbes had printed his Elemento filosofica Decivet at Paris in 1642, and a stray copy may have reached Cambridge. So inquisitive and philosophically sensitive a mind as Cudworth's would readily catch any breath of new philosophy, especially of a character so alien as that of Hobbes and so opposed to his deepest convictions. In the same year in which he took his degree of bachelor of divinity, Cudworth was appointed master of Claire Hall by the parliamentary visitors in the room of Dr. Pask, whom they had ejected. The Puritan authorities confided in Cudworth as they did in Wichcote on what precise grounds it would be difficult to say. He had certainly not been active as a religious partisan. His theological spirit was very unlike that of the Westminster Assembly. But along with Wichcote he had been bred at Emmanuel, and to have been a student there seems to have formed a sufficient passport to promotion in the eyes of Parliament. It is not said that Cudworth, like his friend, had any scruples in accepting the enforced vacancy. He moves amongst all the contentions of his time with a singular freedom of conscience, and in turn all its changes seem to have dealt gently with him. While Wichcote at the Restoration was compelled to retire from the University by special command of the King, he remained in quiet possession of his post. The comparatively active character of the former as a leader of opinion may account for this, or it may have been that Cudworth was protected by some special influence. He was shortly afterwards presented by Sheldon to a living. Yet during all the time of the Commonwealth he was in some respects peculiarly associated with Cromwell and his friends. In the year succeeding his appointment to Clare Hall he was further made regious professor of Hebrew, and from this time he is said to have chiefly given himself to academical work. He had had a special knowledge of Jewish literature and great interest in Jewish antiquities. The duties of such a position were therefore thoroughly congenial to him. He lectured, or read every Wednesday, his subject being the Temple of Jerusalem. Worthington, who communicates this information, was himself an adept at such studies, and when Cudworth was obliged to be absent he seems to have taken his place as professor of Hebrew and lectured in his stead. February 13, 1651-2, February 20-27, I read Hebrew lectures in the schools for Dr. Cudworth. Diary and correspondence of Dr. Worthington, Master of Jesus College, Cambridge, etc., printed for the Chatham Society, chiefly from the Baker Manuscripts in the British Museum, under the editorship of James Crossley Esquire. Mr. Crossley is an enthusiastic admirer of the Cambridge Divines, and his notes are full of valuable matter regarding them. End of footnote. But while thus mainly occupied with his duties as a teacher in the university, he does not seem to have abandoned, as Birch says he did, the functions of a minister. He may no longer have had any duty as a preacher, yet it was two years after his appointment as professor that he preached his great sermon before the House of Commons. We shall afterwards examine this sermon, which is one of the most remarkable productions of Cudworth's genius, and then along with the companion sermon which follows out the subject by far his finest composition. If he had never written anything else, these sermons would have given him a position among our rational theologians. Their strain could hardly have been relished by the leaders, either of the army or of the Presbyterian majority in Parliament, then pausing in face of one another, jealous and uncertain as to their real movements. But it is not the less but all the more noble on that account, and the picture of Catholic Christianity which he draws was not without its effect on the greatest minds that listened to him. He continued in these academic functions for ten years, but apparently not without distraction. Though the places which he held in the university were very honourable, says Birch, yet he found the revenue of them not sufficient to support him. This is a curious statement and illustrates either the singular poverty of two important positions in the University of Cambridge or some tendency to unreasonable extravagance in their occupant. The latter seems an unlikely supposition. The true explanation, in the light of what follows, probably is that while as master of Clare Hall and professor of Hebrew, Cudworth may have had enough to support him as a bachelor, he had not enough to enable him to marry and settle with comfort. He evidently desired to do this and even contemplated leaving the university, an event spoken of with apprehension by Worthington in his letters. January 1651 Apparently he had left for a time, but whether to undertake any duty elsewhere is not stated. The misfortune of his academic loss was averted by the master ship of Christ's college becoming vacant in 1654 and Cudworth's appointment to the succession. After many tossings, says Worthington, Dr. Cudworth is, through God's providence, returned to Cambridge and settled in Christ's college and by his marriage more settled and fixed. Of his wife we learn nothing, neither Birch nor Worthington tells us anything, but we shall afterwards hear of one of his daughters, illustrious in herself, and as the special friend of Locke. Three years previous to his marriage and settlement in Christ's college, Cudworth had taken his degree of Doctor of Divinity. There is little to be told of his life from this period till the restoration. His mind was fully occupied in the work of his college and of the Hebrew chair which he continued to hold and also in the quiet satisfactions of domestic life. Occasionally we catch a glimpse of him in connection with the outward political world. In the year 1657 there appears to have been an intention to submit what is known as the authorized version of Scripture, issued in the reign of James, to further revision and correction. The business was entrusted to the Lord Commissioner Whitelock and a grand committee of Parliament. This committee in turn nominated a subcommittee to send for and advise with certain divines amongst whom we find the names of Walton and Cudworth as to the several translations and impressions of the Bible. The committee, Whitelock himself tells us, often held their conferences with these and the other most learned men in the oriental tongues at his house. Diverse, excellent, and learned observations were made as to some mistakes in the authorized version which yet was agreed to be the best of any translation in the world. I took pains in it, he adds, but it became fruitless by the Parliament's dissolution. It may well be doubted whether the time was favorable for meddling with King James's version or whether Cudworth and Walton, with all their learning, were men to whom it would have been safe to entrust any remodeling of its grand English. Cudworth's appointment to consult with the Committee of the House of Commons on this important subject is a sufficient evidence of his connection with the party in power. But there are indications of closer and more confidential intercourse betwixt him and the Commonwealth authorities. John Thurlow was Secretary of State both for Cromwell and his son Richard. He was a busy earnest man devoted to the great protector and the interests of his government. He had a keen eye for ability in all the services of the State, like his Master, and is set afterwards to have refused Charles II's office of employment on the plea that he despaired of serving him as he had served Cromwell, whose rule was to seek out men for places and not places for men. Thurlow and Cudworth were confidential correspondents. And reply to an application as to men belonging to the University fitted for political and civil employment. We have a long reply from Cudworth. A second letter unavoidably belayed, he says, in which he recommends various persons to Thurlow's notice as fitted for political and civil employments. Among others, Mr. George Rust, a fellow of his college, of whom we have already heard in connection with Taylor, and who will come before us again. He is described in the letter to Thurlow as, quote, an understanding, pious, discreet man of exceeding good parts and a general scholar, but one that seems not so willing to divert himself from preaching and divinity, which he hath of late intended. Otherwise, his parts are such as would enable him for any employment, close quote. On another occasion, Cudworth is found recommending to the Secretary of State, as chaplain to the English merchants at Lisbon, Mr. Zachary Craddock, afterwards provost of Eaton College, and famous for his uncommon learning and abilities as a preacher. Such communications betoken cordial relations betwixt Cudworth and the Commonwealth government. In themselves they may not come to much, but they mean more than at first they seem to do. For to Cromwell and his officials the appointment of a Protestant chaplain to the English residents at Lisbon was a serious affair with some international significance. How far our divine came in contact with the great protector himself there is no means of clearly determining. But the language of a subsequent letter to Thurlow, written in the beginning of 1659, after the accession of Richard, leaves it to be inferred that Cromwell had personally known and appreciated him. The letter has a special interest in reference to the writer's literary employments. Now I have this opportunity I shall use the freedom to acquaint you with another business. I am persuaded by friends to publish some discourses which I have prepared in Latin that will be of a polemical nature in defense of Christianity against Judaism, explaining some chief places of Scripture controverted between the Jews and us, as Daniel's prophecy of the seventy weeks never yet sufficiently cleared and improved, and with all extricating many difficulties of chronology. Which task I the rather undertake not only because it is suitable to my Hebrew profession, and because I have lighted on some Jewish writings upon the argument as have scarcely been ever seen by any Christians, which would the better enable me fully to confute them, but also because I can see fit a work proper and suitable to this present age. However, though I should not be able myself to be any way instrumental to these great transactions of Providence, not without cause hoped for of many, amongst the Jews, yet I persuade myself my pains may not be altogether unprofitable for the setting and establishing of Christians. Or at least I shall give an account of my spending such vacant hours as I could redeem from my preaching and other occasions, and the perpetual distractions of the bursarship which the statutes of this college impose upon me. It was my purpose to dedicate these fruits of my studies to His Highness, to whose noble father I was much obliged, if I may have leave or presume so to do, which I cannot better understand by any than yourself if you shall think it convenient when you have an opportunity to insinuate any such thing which I permit wholly to your prudence. I intend, God willing, to be in London some time in March, and then I shall wait upon you to receive your information. The discourse concerning Daniel's prophecy of the seventy weeks mentioned in this letter as ready for publication was never published. It is said still to exist in manuscript. It is highly commended by Dr. Henry Moore in his preface to his explanation of the grand mystery of godliness published in 1660. According to his statement it was read in the public schools of the university with great applause and admiration, demonstrating to the satisfaction of the hearers and the confusion of Joseph's Scaliger, whose over great opinion had too long misled the world, that the manifestation of the Messiah had fallen out at the end of the sixty-ninth week and his passion in the midst of the last in the most proper and natural sense thereof, which demonstration, as Cudworth's admiring friend, is of as much price and worth in theology as either the circulation of the blood in physics or the motion of the earth in natural philosophy. Such panagyric is unhappily its own refutation. It is somewhat difficult now to understand it and the fascination which such subjects had for men like Cudworth and Moore. The higher speculations which already had interested our author were certainly ill-exchanged for the composition of a polemical treatise against the Jews as to the interpretation of Daniel's prophecy. But such prophetical studies, it is to be remembered, were directly suggested by his Hebrew professorship and those Jewish antiquarian researches which so powerfully attracted him. They were, moreover, intensely exciting to his age and even thirty years later to Newton and his age. It is curious to reflect that the only bond of connection between these two great names should be across the barren line of studies which most wise men have now agreed to set aside. In writing to Locke, in the beginning of 1691, Newton explains his idea of the apocalyptic vision of Daniel, Chapter 7, as identical with that of St. John, Revelation 12, and in the same letter sends his service to Mrs. Cudworth, then resident with her daughter, Lady Masham, with whom the author of the essay on the human understanding was at the same time domiciled and continued to be so till the close of his life in 1703. Cudworth, Newton, and Locke, all concentrating their interest upon a literal interpretation of an obscure vision in Daniel, is a phenomenon hardly intelligible to our age and the new eyes with which it has learned to look upon scripture and interpret its prophetical mysteries. The restoration left Cudworth in undisturbed procession of his academical position. He has said even to have written a copy of verses in congratulation of the event. We have no other means of ascertaining his feelings regarding it. Probably he felt, as many did, that Charles' return was the only means of saving the country from prolonged anarchy. It is very unlikely that the friend of Cromwell and the correspondent of Thurlow cherished any enthusiastic emotions of loyalty. He had cordially accepted the Commonwealth while it lasted and his wish to dedicate the fruits of his prophetic studies to Richard Cromwell in the beginning of 1659 do not indicate any doubts of its permanence. If he hailed the restoration, therefore, in a congratulatory ode, he no doubt did so in the spirit of official compliment which was then so common. As he had served Cromwell and his son, so when the country turned from Cromwell to Charles and the return of royalty seemed an absolute necessity to the establishment of civil order and peace, he was equally ready to serve the new government. There is much to be said from Cudworth's point of view for such an accommodating spirit. He was not and had never been a party man. He was, in fact, singularly free from party or political enthusiasm, deeply interested as he was in the great principles lying at the foundation of civil and social order. It was not for him, he may have thought, to interfere with political changes or to quarrel with the government desired by the country. He had not adapted his theological principles to the Puritan authorities. He did not now change them to please the Caroline bishops. But as he had accepted the Parliament and the appointment which had offered him, so now he joined with the national feeling in welcoming the king. And when Sheldon presented him to a living, he saw no reason for refusing it. We do not wish that he should have done so, but we cannot help regretting that men like Cudworth were so passive in this great crisis. It may have been their duty, as it was their convenience, to acknowledge quietly the new order of things. But it was certainly also their duty to raise their voice on behalf of an equitable and liberal settlement of church affairs. This they shrank from doing, and so far as we know, fell in, however reluctantly, with the side of tyrannous reaction. We cannot wish that Cudworth had repelled Sheldon's kindness, but it was certainly no credit to him or to any of the Cambridge school that they did not protest against Sheldon's policy. More than once in the course of our history we have had occasion to point out this fatal practical timidity on the part of men who yet did so much intellectually to advance the cause of liberty, who, in fact, first enunciated in England its true principles. Thinkers, as they were, with a comprehensive insight into the genuine principles both of social and religious order, they lacked courage and the adventurous enthusiasm which carries forward a great cause. And this is why history has hitherto done so little justice to them. Men of thought who do not venture to stand boldly forward in defense of their principles, who in fact deliberately fall behind the men of action in the gravest turns of the state, must be content to be forgotten, comparatively at least, when the story of the state comes to be told. End of Chapter 4 Part 1 Section 11 of Rational Theology and Christian Philosophy Volume 2 by John Tullock. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 4 Ralph Cudworth, Christian Philosophy in Conflict with Materialism Part 2 From this time forwards there can barely be traced any outline of circumstance in Cudworth's life. The living to which he was appointed, two years after the restoration, was the vicarage of Ashwell in Hertfordshire, but it does not appear whether he ever settled there. Birch's account, sufficiently imperfect up to this point, now passes into mere desultory confusion out of which it is impossible to extort any sequence of narrative. We are told that he was formally admitted to his living in the end of 1662, but we get no further trace of him till the beginning of 1665. Then we have a series of letters, one from Cudworth himself to Worthington, and others from more to Worthington, which serve to throw some light on his intellectual plans and labours. He had reverted to his former speculations and was busy with his treatise on moral good and evil. Probably the course of thought since the restoration had alarmed him and reawakened all his anxiety to clear up the essential idea of morality and place its fundamental principles on a rational basis. But he seems to have worked slowly and halted frequently in his progress. In the meantime the subject was taken up by Moore at the earnest entreaty of certain friends, and our author seemed likely to be forestalled in the great design of his life. His anxiety on this score is the subject of his letter to Worthington, which bears the date of January 1665. Natural as his feelings may have been, there is something undignified in their mode of expression, and the curious jealousy which he betrays lest Moore should really anticipate him. Quote, You know I have had this design concerning good and evil or natural ethics a great while, which I had begun above a year ago, when I made the first sermon in the chapel about the argument, to study over anew and dispatch a discourse about it. No man had so frequently exhorted me to it and so earnestly as this friend. But about three months since, unexpectedly, he told me on a sudden he had begun a discourse on the same argument. The next day, in writing, I imparted my mind more fully and plainly to him, whereupon he came to me and told me he would speak with me about it after a day or two. So he did, and then excused the business, that he could not tell whether I would dispatch and finish it or no, because I had been so long about it, that Mr. Fullwood and Mr. Jenks had solicited him to do this, and that you were very glad that he would undertake it. But now he understood I was resolved to go through with it, he was very glad of it, that he would desist and throw his into a corner. All this I impart to you privately, because a common friend. I have not spoken to anybody else but Mr. Standish and something to Mr. Jenks and Fullwood." More certainly appears in the higher light in this correspondence. He seems unaffectedly anxious that Cudworth should do the work rather than himself. His reluctance to enter upon it, and his deference to the claims of his friend, are frank and genuine. In his second letter he gives a detailed account of all the circumstances which led to his writing himself an ethical treatise, how little at first he relished the idea, but how gradually his mind was attracted by it, as well as his conscience moved by the importunity of his friends. He repeats the same account virtually in his address Ad Lectorum, prefixed to his Ankeridion Ethicum, published in 1667. End of footnote. Nothing would content them but his quote, setting upon the work as it was uncertain when Dr. Cudworth's would come out. And the effect of so much earnestness was that he awoke one morning with all the subject on his mind, and began seriously to think of a task thus providentially presented to him, crossing as it did the order of his studies and other great and innocent pleasures which he had promised himself in following out this order. We do not learn the special causes which retarded the publication of Cudworth's work. There may have been some difficulty regarding the publication, as in the case of his later great work, a difficulty which Moore's work may have escaped as being in Latin, or the size of the work, as was the fashion of all his writing, may have so grown upon him as to impede its progress. There is a discourse by him on moral good and evil existing in manuscript and extending in several folios to nearly a thousand pages. There is further a manuscript containing the heads of another book of morality, which seems to have been especially intended in refutation of Hobbes. These manuscripts, with others, including a discourse on liberty and necessity, probably the same since published under a title of A Treatise of Free Will, and The Treatise on Daniel's Seventy Weeks, already referred to, are preserved in the British Museum. The story of Cudworth's manuscripts, extracted from the biography of Britannica, will be found by the reader in the advertisement prefixed to The Brief Treatise of Free Will, 1837, which is merely a definite expansion of thoughts on this subject, more or less found in his larger and better-known works. And a footnote. And lastly, there is his well-known treatise concerning eternal and immutable morality, which was not given to the public till almost half a century after his death, in 1731, when it was edited from papers in possession of his grandson, Sir Francis Cudworth Masham, by Dr. Chandler, then Bishop of Durham. It is difficult to say to which of these treatises the correspondence with Worthington refers. The immutable morality is generally assumed, in accordance with Dr. Chandler's statements in the preface, to have been composed after the publication of The Intellectual System, and in this case, the larger discourse, still in manuscript, on moral good and evil, the title of which more strictly corresponds to his own language in writing to Worthington, would probably be the work on which he was occupied in 1665. The heads of another book of morality, so far as they are given in detail by Birch, do not necessarily indicate a separate treatise. But the question is of little importance. Cudworth's position as a moralist is abundantly apparent in his two great works, and it is hardly possible that any further light would be thrown upon it by the publication of any of his manuscripts. Valuable as all his intellectual work is, in a certain sense, he is not one of those authors whose writings are to be prized merely for themselves. His voluminousness was a literary habit. It did not arise from the growth or expansiveness of his thought, but from the discursiveness of his mind, and the curious stores of learning at his command. The reader, for the most part, can gather the substance of his argument or the pith of his meaning in comparatively short compass. The immutable morality, therefore, may certainly be held, in conjunction with his larger work, to give us a complete view of his moral system. The brief treatise of Free Will, recently published, 1837, adds nothing to its essential meaning. The publication of the true intellectual system of the universe fills up for the reader what remains of Cudworth's life. This great work, so far as it was ever finished, for it remained an immense fragment, was finished and ready to be published in 1671. The imprimatur, by Dr. Samuel Parker, Chaplain to Sheldon, now promoted to be Archbishop, bears the date of May 29th in that year. But its publication was delayed till 1678 on account of great opposition from some of the courtiers of King Charles II, who endeavored to destroy the reputation of it when it was first published. Birch, who gives us this information, adds in characteristic style, quote, your religion began now to lift up its head, and the progress of it was opposed by no person with greater force and learning than by our author. Close quote. The course of thought, as well as the tone of society, had greatly altered since the days of the Commonwealth. Tendencies which were then only beginning to show themselves had grown to maturity. Hobbes' great work, published in 1651, reflects the course of change in the public mind as it helped greatly to advance it. The reader of the Leviathan now is apt to be struck mainly by the vigor and life of its speculative delineations, and no philosophical work was ever written with more power and liveliness. But after all, nothing is more remarkable in it than its political spirit and design. It aimed to set up a new order of things, or rather an old order in a new form. The age had become sick of theological controversy and of the struggles after a higher development of religious and political liberty. Many had never shared in its religious aspirations and the very intensity of those aspirations and the fierce conflicts which they provoked had served to exhaust them. Thus at length there was not only a lull but a resurgence in the tide of spiritual and political emotion. Men's minds turned from the chaotic picture of warring sects, a dilapidated church, and a commonwealth which, however strong in the strong hands which ruled it, had failed to work itself into any constitutional form to the old ideas of authority which had once bound the national life in firm chords of unity, and controlled the action of both church and state. Hobbes is one of the most significant expressions of the spirit of reaction in the higher mind of England in the second half of the seventeenth century. There is nothing deeper in him than disgust of religious zeal and contentiousness and the assertion of an inviolable rule binding the whole sphere of religion and morality as well as politics. But the reaction as might have been expected ran to excess. The ruin of dreams inspired by religious enthusiasm proved fatal not only to religious ambition but in many respects to moral and spiritual life. Men began to doubt of the reality of that which had promised so much and done so little. They despaired of a religious philosophy or of any theory fitted to organize and bind into one the higher and lower facts of human life. This is always the danger of such a period of national subsidence. Not only are religious ideals shattered, broken in their very attempt to accomplish too much, but religion itself suffers and becomes discredited by the absurdities and failures which mark its course. Never was this more signally illustrated than after the restoration. The disgust with which men turn from the religious controversies of the preceding period not only vented itself in weariness and ridicule of what had gone before but in a widespread distrust of spiritual verities altogether. To higher minds who preserved alive their power of faith as well as of thought, this was the ominous feature of the times and excited their chief anxiety. They could see below the superficial drifts of opinion with all their tendency towards some new form of external authority, deep springs of unbelief. They saw such tendencies in Hobbes with all his avowed conservatism in church and state. Reactionary and authoritative in the design of his speculations, it was evident to them that their real drift was to undermine the foundations of religious truth and under a show of respect for it to leave no rational basis for religion at all. They were not deceived as some modern critics have been by the religious form and phraseology of his writings. They looked beyond the surface of his dogmatisms to their radical spirit and meaning and drew the unhesitating conclusion that a philosophy which left no divine capacity in human nature was essentially un-Christian and could only be met by a counter philosophy which went to the depths of human thought and belief. This was the great task now essayed by Cudworth as it had been long pondered by him. No one, there is reason to believe, had seen earlier, as no one estimated more clearly and fully, the force of the irreligious movement. Further, no one had studied more closely the dogmatic and formal enthousiasms which had so long dominated the religious mind of England or recognized more the inevitable tendency to reaction which lay in them. His broad and keen rational insight and deep though quiet seriousness discerned the full nature of the crisis and had long done so. Slowly and heavily, but surely, his mind had been working for years at the special problems raised by the penetrating and bold genius of Hobbes, so fitly corresponding to the spirit of an age at once reactionary and skeptical. The publication of his great work, The Intellectual System of the Universe, in 1678, was the outcome of his long gathered and laboriously pondered speculation on the subject. The reception of the work was such as might have been expected in the evil times on which it had fallen. Delayed in its issue by courtier intrigues, it was assailed almost as soon as made public by superficial and unthinking religionists. First, a Roman Catholic student, with leave of superiors, attacked its views of the pagan philosophy and mythology which no doubt raised many questions. Then, a Protestant divine, Mr. John Turner, accused the author of being a tritheistic, a sect for which he supposes the author may have a kindness because he loves hard words. He is certain that Cudworth, if not a tritheistic, is something else without either stick or trick, and that the most charity itself can allow the doctor, if it were to step forth and speak his most favorable character to the world, is that he is an Aryan, a Sosinian, a deist. Even Dryden, whose easy indifference and professed conversion to Romanism very well represent the spirit of the time, had a hit at the author of the intellectual system as having raised such strong objections against the being of a god and providence that many think he has not answered them. There is never anybody so unthinkingly orthodox as the clever man of the world when he thinks it necessary to interest himself in religion. The broad, open-eyed candor and large-mindedness of Cudworth were unintelligible to the definite facile and sharply molding intellect of the author of the religio laici and the hind and the panther. Cudworth's fate as a Christian thinker was discouraging, and he felt it to be so. But it was, as Shaftesbury said, only the common fate of those who dare to appear fair authors. The religious world welcomes decision rather than frankness and is still capable of accusing an author, of giving the upper hand to the atheists for having only stated their reasons and those of their adversaries fairly together. Fifty years later, Warburton, who greatly admired and appreciated the author of the intellectual system, speaks with some bitterness of the treatment which he received and its effects. Although few, he says, were able to follow his profound arguments, yet the very slowest were able to unravel his secret purpose to tell the world that he was an atheist in his heart and an Aryan in his book. Would the reader know the consequence? Why the zealots inflamed the bigots? Was the time's plague when madmen led the blind? The silly calamity was believed. The much-injured author grew disgusted, his ardor slackened, and the rest and far greatest part of the defense never appeared. Close quote. In course of time, however, the great power and learning of the intellectual system secured it a worthy reception with all thoughtful and scholarly readers both at home and abroad. Leclerc, when he commenced his bibliotech schwasi in 1703, gave large extracts from it, which engaged him in a controversy with Bale. He expressed at the same time a desire that the work should be translated into Latin for the benefit of continental students. Several attempts were made to do this, but the task was not accomplished till thirty years later, when Mosheim, so well known for his labors in church history, published his translation with many valuable notes and illustrations, which have been again translated into English and are found in one of the most common editions of the intellectual system. A translation was also begun into French in the beginning of last century, but never completed. In the meantime, the work was abridged in English by Mr. Wise, a fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, under the title of A Confutation of the Reason and Philosophy of Atheism. This abridgment was published at London in 1706 and prefaced by an elaborate introduction in which Cudworth's views regarding the trinity and the resurrection of the body are examined at length. With the publication of his great work, Cudworth's life may be said to terminate, although he survived ten years later. Whether or not it be altogether true, as Warburton says, that the reception of his work disgusted him, there is reason to think that his intellectual activity was not prolonged beyond the date of its appearance. In the same year he was made a probandary of Gloucester. Probably the same influence which had befriended him at the restoration secured for him this final promotion. He died at Cambridge on the 26th of June 1688 in the 71st year of his age and was interred in the chapel of the college in which he had so long lived as master. Of his personal character and manners we have no description, nor is it easy to discern the familiar lineaments of the man as he lived and moved among his friends through all the meager and desultory vagueness of Birch's account or any other notices of his life which have come down to us. In his correspondence with Worthington we have seen some trace of a slight narrowness and jealousy of temper, but this is a mere transitory evolution which after all may mean very little. Moore's more agile and discursive spirit had outstripped him in his favorite intellectual ambition of writing a book on natural ethics and some soreness of feeling was excusable in the circumstances. Such indications as we can gather point upon the whole to an elevated and noble character. A spirit not only free from the vulgar sectarianisms of the time but intent upon high objects and generous as it was lofty. His portrait conveys the same impression. If somewhat heavily lined like that of witchcoat and even touched with austerity in its massive and long-drawn features it is also full of sweetness. The face is that of a severe and powerful but also a gentle-minded and tolerantly meditative student. We have already alluded to Cudworth's daughter and our notice of the father would not be complete without adding a few words concerning her. She inherited his metaphysical genius and may be said by herself to deserve a niche in the history of English philosophy but she is chiefly known as the fast and cordial friend of Locke who died at her house in 1704 where he had resided in retirement some years before. She became the second wife of Sir Francis Mashham of Oates in the county of Essex and her son rose to some distinction as a master in the court of Chancery. Her chief writing was A Discourse Concerning the Love of God published at London in 1696. She introduces this tract with observing that, quote, whatever reproaches have been made by the Romanists on the one hand of the want of books of devotion in the Church of England or by the dissenters on the other of a dead and lifeless way of preaching it may be affirmed that there cannot anywhere be found so good a collection of discourses on moral subjects as might be made of English sermons and other treatises of that nature written by the divines of our Church which books are certainly of themselves the greatest and most general use of any and do most conduce to that which is the chief aim of Christianity a good life. She then, quote, animadverts upon those who undervalue morality and others who strain the duties of it to an impracticable pitch and pretend to ascend by it to something beyond or above it, close quote. And afterwards proceeds to consider the conduct of those who build their practical and devotional discourses upon principles which will not bear the test but which oblige them to lay down such assertions of morality as sober and well-disposed Christians cannot understand to be practicable. And here she applies herself to the examination of Mr. John Norris's scheme in his practical discourses and other treatises wherein he maintains that, quote, mankind are obliged strictly as their duty to love with desire nothing but God only every degree of desire of any creature whatsoever being sinful which assertion Mr. Norris defends upon this ground that God, not the creature, is the immediate efficient cause of our sensations. For whatsoever gives us pleasure has a right to our love but God only gives us pleasure therefore He only has a right to our love. This hypothesis is considered with great accuracy and ingenuity by Lady Masham and the bad consequences of it represented in a strong light. Her discourse was translated into French by Mr. Peter Cost and printed at Amsterdam in 1705. Close quote. Footnote. Norris, the famous idealist, rector of Bemerton, whose connection with Moore and the Platonic movement will afterwards appear. End of footnote. Lady Masham was plainly a genuine disciple of her father's rational theology distinguished like him by breadth of insight, candor, and love of truth as well as by unusual learning, sagacity, and penetration. It is interesting to connect through her the names of Cudworth, Newton, and Locke. The history of philosophy is lightened and even its higher significance brought into relief by any episode which, like this, unveils its diffusive influence and the pleasant friendships which underlie and unite its great movements. Two. In now turning to examine Cudworth's work as a Christian teacher and thinker, there are three main aspects in which he may be regarded. First, as a preacher. Second, as a theistic thinker. And third, as a moralist. The same lines of thought more or less appear in all his writings and there is especially intimate relation betwixt his higher philosophy unfolded in the intellectual system and his views as a moralist. But it will conduce to clearness and help to bring out more fully both the value of his labors and his position in connection with his time and the school to which he belongs to consider him in these successive points of view. One. Our knowledge of Cudworth as a preacher rests upon two sermons, one of which, as already mentioned, he delivered before the House of Commons on the 31st of March 1647. This sermon of itself places him in the highest rank as a preacher. Large in thought and eloquent in expression, it is instinct throughout with a glow of feeling and harmony and grace of composition which are too rare with him. It is a pleasing surprise after his earlier writings published with only his initials in 1642. These serve to show the bent of his mind and the instruments of his early culture, the recondite sources from which he fed his great intellectual appetite. But he is hardly as yet in them thinking for himself. With great acuteness, ingenuity and learning they have something also of the rawness and pedantic parade of acquired learning which belong to a young writer. But in his sermon before the House of Commons his mind moves with power, ease and felicity. There is everywhere the inspiration of a living and noble sense of truth, a perception of its divine catholicity and grandeur which raises him far above the sectarian contests waged in its name. While the circumstances in which he speaks, the great crisis and the great audience before him give an unwanted wing to his thoughts and an unwanted rapidity and symmetry to their form. We give a few extracts. Quote, Ink and paper can never make us Christians, can never beget a new nature, a living principle in us, can never form Christ or any true notions of spiritual things in our hearts. The Gospel, that new law which Christ delivered to the world is not merely a dead letter without us but a quickening spirit within us. Cold theorems and maxims, dry and jujune disputes, lean so logistical reasonings could never yet of themselves beget the least glimpse of true heavenly light, the least sap of saving knowledge in any heart. All this is but the groping of the poor dark spirit of man after truth to find it out with his own endeavors and feel it with his own cold and benumbed hands. Words and syllables which are but dead things cannot possibly convey the living notions of heavenly truths to us. The secret mysteries of a divine life, of a new nature, of Christ formed in our hearts, they cannot be written or spoken, language and expressions cannot reach them. Neither can they be ever truly understood except the soul itself be kindled from within and awakened into the life of them. A painter that would draw a rose, though he may flourish some likeness of it in figure and color, yet he can never paint the scent and fragrancy, or if he would draw a flame, he cannot put a constant heat into his colors. He cannot make his pencil drop a sound as the echo in the epigram mocks at him. All the skill of cunning artisans and mechanics cannot put a principle of life into a statue of their own making. Neither are we able to enclose in words and letters the life, soul and essence of any spiritual truths and as it were to incorporate it in them. Close quote. Again quote. The best assurance that anyone can have of his interest in God is doubtless the conformity of his soul to him. Those divine purposes whatsoever they be are altogether unsearchable and unknowable by us. They lie wrapped up in everlasting darkness and covered in a deep abyss. Who is able to fathom the bottom of them? Let us not therefore make this our first attempt towards God and religion to persuade ourselves strongly of these everlasting decrees. For if at our first flight we aim so high we shall happily but scorch our wings and we struck back with lightning as those giants of old were that would needs attempt to assault heaven. And it is indeed a most gigantic essay to thrust ourselves so boldly into the lap of heaven. It is a prank of Nimrod of a mighty hunter thus rudely to deal with God and to force heaven and happiness before his face whether he will or no. The way to obtain a good assurance indeed of our title to heaven is not to clamber up to it by a ladder of our own ungrounded persuasions but to dig as low as hell by humility and self-denial in our own hearts. And though this may seem to be the farthest way about yet it is indeed the nearest and safest way to it. We must as the Greek epigram speaks ascend downward and descend upward if we would indeed come to heaven or get any true persuasion of our title to it. O divine love the sweet harmony of souls the music of angels the joy of God's own heart the very darling of his bosom the source of true happiness the pure quintessence of heaven that which reconciles the jarring principles of the world and makes them all chime together that which melts men's hearts into one another. Let us endeavor to promote the gospel of peace the dove-like gospel with a dove-like spirit. This was the way by which the gospel at first was propagated in the world. Christ did not cry nor lift up his voice in the streets. A bruised reed he did not break and the smoking flax he did not quench and yet he brought forth judgment unto victory. He whispered the gospel to us from Mount Zion in a still voice and yet the sound thereof went out quickly throughout all the earth. The gospel at first came down upon the world gently and softly like the dew upon Gideon's fleece and yet it quickly soaked quite through it and doubtless this is the most effectual way to promote it further. Sweetness and ingenuity will more command men's minds than passion, sourness, and severity. As the soft pillow sooner breaks the flint than the hardest marble. Let us follow truth in love and of the two indeed be contented rather to miss of the conveying of a speculative truth than to part with love. When we would convince men of any error by the strength of truth let us with all pour the sweet balm of love upon their heads. Truth and love are the two most powerful things in the world and when they both go together they cannot easily be withstood. The golden beams of truth and the silken cords of love twisted together will draw men on with a sweet violence whether they will or know. Let us take heed we do not sometimes call that zeal for God and his gospel which is nothing else but our own tempestuous and stormy passion. True zeal is a sweet heavenly and gentle flame which maketh us active for God but always within the sphere of love. It never calls for fire from heaven to consume those who differ a little from us in their apprehensions. It is like that kind of lightning which the philosophers speak of that melts the sword within but singeth not the scabbard. It strives to save the soul but hurteth not the body. True zeal is a loving thing and makes us always active to edification and not to destruction. Close quote. The spirit of Cudworth sermons represents the earlier and less systematic phase of the Cambridge movement as we see it in witchcoat. The attitude of the two preachers towards the religious questions and features of the time is very much alike. There is the same condemnation of its dogmatic and formal extravagances of its assumptions of peculiar knowledge and zeal and generally of its love of religious agitation rather than of religious practice. While in opposition there appear the same leading ideas of the coordinate relation of all knowledge the complementary character of philosophy and religion and the essential connection of religion with life and morality. A. He is eloquent in favor of all true knowledge quote which of itself naturally tends to God who is the fountain of it and would ever be raising our souls up upon its wings thither did not we detain it and hold it down in unrighteousness. All philosophy to a wise man to a truly sanctified mind is but matter for divinity to work upon. Religion is the queen of all those inward endowments of the soul and all pure natural knowledge all virgin and undeflowered arts and sciences are her handmaids that rise up and call her blessed. Close quote. There is no thought more frequently reproduced in all the Cambridge writings than this of the harmonious relation of philosophy and religion of culture and piety of reason and faith. The thought takes various expression and was considered of vital importance for the time. It would be far from true to say that puritanism was unfavorable to learning. In its higher representatives it was eminently learned. It was nonetheless its tendency in all its extreme forms to depreciate natural knowledge and separate the provinces of rational inquiry and religion. The very name of reason excited suspicion and was supposed to carry with it the taint of heresy. This tone was all the more fatal in the seventeenth century that philosophy was then beginning its independent career and ready from its side to isolate and exalt the spirit of rational thought discredited by the prevailing religionism. It was therefore a real service to bring forward the harmonious relations of philosophy and religion and to emphasize the spiritual as the higher side of human nature and not a factitious addition to it made by some process of religious magic. To separate religion from thought is to convert it into a superstition. To separate thought and philosophy from religion is to take from them their highest inspiration. No adequate philosophy can ignore the great problems of life or turn aside from those spiritual realities which are the crown of all our inward endowments and move with such force human history. Division of labor need not imply contradiction of interpretation. A philosophy which is true to facts should find its complement rather than its antagonist in a religion which is also true to facts. A faith which is real and a reason which is right support and do not displace one another. This was the confident idea of the Cambridge Divines and their instinct was right even where their own practice failed. They were by no means free from irrationalities of their own but at least they kept aloof from that massive traditionary and scholastic theory which overlaid the Puritan theology and which has been so little able to withstand the sifting processes of modern inquiry. They gave their chief interest and study to the moral side of Christianity and the divine power which it reveals in the life and sacrifice of divine love. They certainly never show any jealousy of the progress of thought. They know of no conflicts betwixt reason and faith to be soldered up by theological or other devices. Their ideal devotion to reason is unbounded. It is the sovereign of the harmonical or rightly adjusted soul to which re-enthroned in her majestic seat and reinvested with her ancient power all lower faculties and interests must give an account of themselves. End of Chapter 4, Part 2 Section 12 of Rational Theology and Christian Philosophy Volume 2 by John Tulloch This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 4 Ralph Cudworth Christian Philosophy in conflict with materialism Part 3 B But if Cudworth strongly maintained the ultimate harmony of knowledge and faith, he still more strongly maintained the unity of faith and life of religious principle and morality. This is his favorite thought as a preacher. The passages already quoted show this, but he repeats the truth with frequent felicities of expression. The object of religion, he insists, is not to propagate opinions however right or orthodox still less to contend for this or that opinion, but only to persuade men to the life of Christ. This is, quote, the pith and kernel of all religion, without which all its several forms are but so many several dreams. Christ was Vite Magister, not Scoli, and he is the best Christian whose heart beats with the truest pulse towards heaven, not he whose head spineth out the finest cobwebs. He that endeavors really to mortify his lusts and to comply with that truth in his life which his confidence is convinced of, is nearer a Christian though he never heard of Christ, than he that believes all the vulgar articles of the Christian faith and plainly deny of Christ in his life. The way to heaven is plain and easy if we have but honest hearts. We need not many criticisms or school distinctions. Christ came not to ensnare us and entangle us with captious niceties or to puzzle our heads with deep speculations and lead us through hard and craggy notions into the kingdom of heaven. No man shall ever be kept out of heaven for not comprehending mysteries if he had but an honest and good heart that was ready to comply with Christ's commandments." It was the distemper of the times to invert all this. To scare and fright men only with opinions and make them solicitous about the entertaining of this and that speculation. Whilst in the meantime there is no such care taken about keeping of Christ's commandments. We say, lo here is Christ and lo there is Christ in these and these opinions. Whereas in truth Christ is neither here nor there nor anywhere but where the spirit of Christ where the life of Christ is. For men to spend all their zeal upon a violent obtruding of their own opinions and apprehensions upon others which cannot give entertainment to them is repugnant both to the doctrine and example of Christ and an endless source of quote discord and contention in Christian commonwealths whilst in the meantime these hungry and starved opinions devour all the life and substance of religion as the lean kind in Pharaoh's dream did eat up the fat. Close quote. A violent opposition to other men's superstitions without any inward principle of spirit and life in their own souls was common with the noisy religionists of the age. Quote. Many that pull down idols in churches set them up in our hearts and whilst they quarrel with painted glass make no scruple at all of entertaining many foul lusts and committing continual idolatry with them. Close quote. It required some courage to address the British House of Commons in this style in 1647 and some of those addressed can hardly fail to have been pricked in their conscience at the faithful words. There were many puritan preachers ready to handle school distinctions and the captious niceties of orthodoxy but there were few who ventured to speak such words of truth and soberness and to set forth so distinctly the essence and meaning of all religion. At the close of a religious revolution which had excited the most hostile passions and in which the most sacred subjects had passed into shibboleths of party warfare it was a great thing to hold up before those who had been champions alike in the theological and civil strife a picture of religion which transcended all their wrangling and had nothing to do with their most cherished watch words. The very air had become infected with religious contentiousness. Many a grim senator and warrior before the preacher had spent their lives and were willing to have spent their blood for this or that opinion and their hearts must have moved within them to hear from one who was animated by as strong a love of spiritual liberty as any of them that religion in its vital essence had no connection with their favorite speculations and fancies. That an enthusiasm which boasted of its peculiar privilege was no more religion than a sacerdotalism which had prated of ceremonial blessing and that the only true religion was loving God and keeping his commandments the being good and doing good. In the same spirit Cudworth deals with the special question of the relation of justification and sanctification so much spoken of in the religious language of the day. His views here in fact are nothing else than a theological application of his general view of the nature of religion. He does not object to discriminate betwixt justification and sanctification or even to speak of an imputative righteousness. It is not his intention to quarrel about words and phrases as if Christ's meritorious satisfaction might not be said to be imputed to those that repent and believe the gospel for remission of sins. Much less to deny what the Holy Scripture plainly asserts true and living faith that worketh by love which is the very essence of the new creature or regenerate nature to be imputed or accounted for righteousness. But he strongly repudiates the idea of ever conceiving salvation apart from its essential moral meaning and cautions against the quote antinomian error too often insinuated under the notion of imputed righteousness as if there were no necessity of inherent righteousness and a real victory over sin in order to salvation. Close quote. In the second sermon there are many references to the religious parties of the time which Cudworth sketches upon the whole with some degree of fairness and insight but without adequate discrimination. True criticism even of phenomena before their eyes is not to be expected in the writers of the 17th century. Their descriptions are inextricably mingled up with their own prejudices and fancies. Cudworth is free from prejudice but his portraiture is clumsily molded by his own preconceptions and the habits of a meditative rather than a critical intellect. Yet it is easy to trace under his somewhat vague epithets certain obvious divergencies of religious opinion and still more easy to recognize the variety and violence of the religious agitations which moves the century. Footnote ceremonial righteousness opinionative zeal high-flown enthusiasm sarcophicism epicurizing philosophy antinomian liberty etc. End of footnote It was well for the country as well as for religion that there were minds which stood firm amidst the commotion and which could conceive and embody such a picture of genuine Christianity as Cudworth's sermons both present. It is comparatively rare in every age to find earnestness combined with sense and a profound depth of religious feeling with a comprehensive realization of the facts of life. Intensity is the cheap product of excitement and repeated experience proves that there is no force of mere genius which may not be caught by the rising gale of religious enthusiasm and wafted to the wildest heights of absurdity. Ceremonial righteousness or sacerdotalism in all its forms opinionative zeal or evangelical dogmatism in its many varieties and epicurizing philosophy and an antinomian liberty seemed destined to perpetual resurrection with the wavering advance of religious history. But it remains nevertheless true that the chief hope for human progress and the perfection of the individual lies in a rational Christian thoughtfulness which is at once true to the divine and the human and which while it bows before the mysteries of the unseen acknowledges the claims of those natural verities which religion should elevate and purify but which it can never supersede. 2. We now turn to consider Cudworth in his chief aspect of a religious thinker as presented in his great work the true intellectual system of the universe. Large as this work now is extending in the original folio edition to about 900 pages it was designed to be larger. It expanded unconsciously in the hands of its author till it outgrew all proportion. Some of the digressions run entirely away from the main argument and make the book rather a series of treatises than a definite and coordinated treatise. If it never loses altogether sight of the subject which reappears luminously at the close as at the beginning it has yet in the meantime taken up and explored correlative topics at such length that the reader loses all thread of continuous advance or at least fails to hold in his mind the windings and divergencies of its semi-speculative and semi-historical discussions. The massive build of thought is unreleaved by any graces of style or felicities of literary outline. Yet there is often a marvelous expressiveness in special phrases and passages and the general effect is highly definite and significant. Taken as a whole it is a marvelous magazine of thought and learning and remains one of the most undoubted monuments of the philosophical and theological genius of the 17th century. At first Cudworth seems to have intended merely a treatise on liberty and necessity. But afterwards as he himself explains he saw that the question betwixt him and the hobby in philosophy was really one as to the rational interpretation or true intellectual system of the universe. What is the true position of man therein and what is first and what is last in the order of being? He defines in the outset the various forms of fatalism which appear to him inconsistent with the true order of the universe. There is first material necessity or what he calls the democratic fate which leaves no room for the idea of God or spiritual existence at all but explains all phenomena even those of thought by mechanical laws and the formation of being by the fortuitous concourse or aggregation of atoms. Second theological or religious fatalism taught by many scholastic philosophers and modern theologians which regards all actions as equally necessitated and refers the ideas of good and evil to the arbitrary will of God. This he calls the divine fate immoral. Third a fatalism like the ancient stoicism which without denying the reality of moral ideas or a supreme moral being identifies this being with the invariable order of nature and leaves no room for free will in men or in his own words takes away from men all such liberty as might make them capable of praise and dispraise rewards and punishments. This he calls the divine fate moral. All these forms of fate or necessity are essentially inconsistent with a true theory of religion. The first destroys the divine idea altogether. The second and third mutilate the idea so as to leave it without force or value. Against these views he sets forth three great principles which on the other hand appear to him to sum up religious and moral truth. Viz. First the reality of a supreme divine intelligence and a spiritual world against the atomistic materialism of Democritus and Epicurus. Second the eternal reality of moral ideas against the nominalists of the Middle Ages and modern divines imbued with their principles. And third the reality of moral freedom and responsibility in man against all pantheistic naturalism and stoicism. The work which we have under the name of the true intellectual system of the universe deals formally only with the first of these principles and its correlative antagonism although the author often falls into trains of argument more appropriate to the second or third stage of his designed plan. The treatise on immutable morality may be taken as the accomplishment of the second part. Cudworth thus describes his complete conception or philosophy of religion in his own language. Quote These three things are the fundamentals or essentials of true religion namely that all things do not float without a head and governor but there is an omnipotent understanding being presiding over all that God hath an essential goodness and justice and that the differences of good and evil moral honest and dishonest are not by mere will and law only but by nature and consequently that the deity cannot act influence and necessitate men to such things as are in their own nature evil and lastly that necessity is not intrinsical to the nature of everything but that men have such a liberty or power over their own actions as may render them accountable for the same and blame worthy when they do amiss and consequently that there is a justice distributive of rewards and punishments running through the world. Close quote These three things quote taken all together make up the wholeness and entireness of that which is here called the true intellectual system of the universe in such a sense as atheism may be called a false system thereof the word intellectual being added to distinguish it from the other vulgarly so called systems of the world that is the visible and corporeal world the Ptolemaic Tyconic and Copernican the two former of which are now commonly accounted false the latter true Close quote It is important to notice the moral interest which lies at the root of all Cudworth's speculation although in point of fact the special ethical question with which he started was not embraced in his extended scheme of argument like all his school he not only maintains zealously the essential connection of religion and morality in life but he is unable to understand any basis for an adequate theory or philosophy of religion which does not rest on the conception of man as a free moral subject capable of choosing for himself good or evil as religion cannot exist without morality so morality cannot exist without liberty and thus the divine idea comes in the end to sustain itself on the fact of free will as an essential attribute or characteristic of humanity this coordination of thought will be found to underlie all his system of philosophy throughout he is not only in modern language an intuitional moralist but one who never loses sight of the great idea of free will as the core and life of both religion and morality the treatise of free will shows this more fully but not more plainly than it was previously indicated in his writings the breakdown of his complete plan makes Cudworth doubt whether he should not have spared the general title his hope had been to embrace within the compass of a single volume three several books each book having its own particular title as one against atheism two for natural justice and morality founded in the deity three for liberty from necessity and a distributive justice of rewards and punishments in the world close quote he makes an apology for his shortcoming but at the same time maintains the completeness and unity of his work so far as it had been accomplished it contained he says all that belonged to its own particular title and subject and was in that respect no peace but a whole Cudworth readers are not likely to find fault with him for having abbreviated the original extent of his design especially as he has in several places in the beginning of his fourth chapter for example and elsewhere really comprised many of the considerations that would have entered into the special treatment of the subjects of the second and third books proposed by him his real fault everywhere is not abbreviation but diffusion and as we have already observed he is eminently one of those writers who carry with them into all special details of argument the full significance and flavor of the general principles which lie at the basis of their thought it is difficult to do justice to a work like Cudworth's and yet keep our remarks within any such compass and unity as would interest the modern reader or deserve to interest him and this difficulty arises not merely from the vast and unorganized materials of the book but perhaps in a still greater degree from the constant repetition of its main ideas the author constantly returns on the same strain and even the same modes of expression in meeting the atheistic objections with which he deals he lays over and over again his theistic platform in the face of the subversive planes of thought which appear before him but he often adds little as he advances to the substance of his argument he does not dig its foundations deeper nor raise its structure higher the pervading polemical character of the work adds to its confusion and desultoriness it is as he himself says an argument against atheism rather than in favor of theism the first three chapters are devoted to the several atheistic systems as conceived and discriminated by him in the fourth chapter he enters for the first time upon the positive aspect of his subject and endeavors to deal directly with the idea of God but he has no sooner begun than he has seduced into the two longest of all his digressions as to the true meaning of the pagan mythology and the relation of the platonic and christian trinities both these excursions which are treatises in themselves spring up in connection with the primary divine attribute of unity in the fifth and last chapter which is subdivided into five sections he resumes the thread of his exposition of the idea of God with something in the shape of proof of the validity or objective character of the idea or in other words of argumentative evidence for the being of a God but here too his argument is chiefly negative or in the form of replies to objections it takes everywhere the aspect of polemical rather than of direct exposition positive principles only come out against a vast background of argumentative and negative detail they do not stand clear and together by themselves to take up the course of discussion therefore from point to point in this vast and tangled array would be to plunge into a review of systems and a mass of philology and antiquity as the author himself says which would ill reward our pains for his mode of dealing with ancient opinion was simply accumulative he masked quotations from every source but he neither illumined them with discerning insight nor sifted and fitted them together with reference to their relative meaning or any sense of historical perspective it would be easier for modern criticism to begin the task de novo and reconstruct the ancient speculative systems and the fabric of pagan mythology from first sources than to attempt to unravel the maze which they exhibit in his pages we abandon therefore all attempt to do so as labor both useless in itself and without any bearing on our purpose which is to bring out the significance of Cudworth's own thought rather than his mode of handling the thought of others our purpose will be best attained by keeping in the first instance free of all his digressions and endeavoring to bring out clearly the import of his theistic attitude against the atheistic systems which he discusses we shall then pass briefly under review his subordinate speculations touching a plastic nature the trinity and the resurrection which have been considered peculiarly characteristic and exposed him to criticism both in his own time and since finally after a brief treatment of his position as a moralist we shall endeavor to estimate his relation to contemporary thinkers particularly Descartes and Hobbes and point out how far any of his speculations may still have a living interest in reference to later cosmical controversies under these successive heads we shall gather up in the best manner all that seems most significant in Cudworth's labors a the materialism which Cudworth chiefly attacks by name is that of democratus bc 460 to 361 and epicurus what he calls the atheism of atomicism but in reality he has constantly in view the speculations of his contemporary Hobbes which he identifies in many ways with the ancient democratic philosophy in the same connection he frequently glances at Descartes who sought in his physical system to solve phenomena by the mere laws of their connection or interdependence without the interposition of any special or subordinate agency the idea now so familiar and it may be said accepted by all thinkers that there is nothing intermediate betwixt the primal mover and all the phenomena of movement which constitute the universe appeared a startling novelty in the 17th century and presented peculiar difficulties to the mind both of Cudworth and of Moore the decisiveness with which the idea was seized by Descartes and the large sphere which he thus seemed to clear for the operation of purely physical laws seemed to them as it were to empty the world of deity and place his action out of view and this serves to explain the manner in which Cudworth occasionally speaks of Descartes as well as Hobbes as inimical to theism footnote referring to the Cartesians he says that they quote have an undissurbed tang of the mechanic atheism hanging about them close quote and a footnote in the opening of his work he distinguishes carefully betwixt the democratic or atomic atheism and the general theory of the atomic philosophy this theory he defines as the recognition of certain primitive simple elements of magnitude figure site motion out of which all corporeal phenomena have been formed instead of seeing anything to condemn in it he traces it more or less in all the philosophical systems of antiquity and even in the primitive Hebrew literature the monads of Pythagoras the homogeneous elements of annex agoras and the root elements of Empedocles are all to him but different phases of the same fundamental conception while a passage in Strabo which speaks of a certain Sidonian or Phoenician of the name of Moscus as the inventor of the atomic theory immediately suggests to him the identity of the said Moscus and Moses there was nothing therefore in this venerable and widely accepted dogma originally inconsistent with theism it professed to explain the physical origin of the universe and nothing else had presupposed the divine will as the primal mover of all but Lucipus and Democritus and after them Protagoras and Epicurus cut off the spiritual side of the philosophy and left only the material they took away the highest part of it and left only as he says the meanest and lowest in this respect Hobbes followed them he repeatedly recursed to this view and reprehends his materialistic opponents with bad faith and stupidity as well as impiety and thus mutilating the old atomic doctrine and putting forth their atheistic speculations under its name the ancient physiologists he says quote atomized but they did not atheize atheistical atomology was a thing first set on foot by Lucipus and Democritus joining these two things together the atomical physiology which supposes that there is nothing in body but magnitude, figure, sight and motion and that prejudice or prepossession of their own minds that there was no other substance in the world besides body between them they begat a certain mongrel and spurious philosophy atheistically atomical or atomically atheistical close quote he strongly repudiates the assertion confidently made in his time and virtually repeated in our own that the ancient philosophers never dreamed of any such thing as incorporeal substance and that this conception is therefore the newfangled invention of bigotl religionists footnote his allusion is evidently to Hobbes' statement chapter 12 part one of the Leviathan that the idea of spirit in the sense of incorporeal substance quote could never enter into the mind of any man by nature close quote and a footnote on the contrary he maintains that though in all ages there have been those who have disbelieved the existence of anything beyond what was sensible the fact of mind or spirit has a distinct substance has been held by all the most distinguished names in philosophy from Thales downwards he quotes Plato and Aristotle at length on the subject and vindicates to himself satisfactorily the conclusions that all the best of the ancient thinkers including the original atomists were both theists and incorporealists in addition to the mechanical hypothesis which is his main point of attack Cudworth indicates three other forms of atheism to which he gives the respective names of one Hylopathian two Cosmoplastic and three Hylozoic all are essentially materialistic no less than the democratic theory in as much as they do not recognize any existence beyond matter but they are distinguished from it and from each other by the very different conceptions under which they regard matter as operating in the formation of nature whereas the mechanical theory views the world as originating inexplicably in the mere conjunction of matter and motion or atoms somehow in movement these speculations severally conceive matter itself as the spring of everything in the first the hule or original matter is supposed to be primarily dead and stupid but to possess qualities and forms capable of generating or pushing forward into all the phenomena of nature and even those which contain life and intelligence this form of atheism is associated with the name of an aximander BC 710 to 547 again quote the Cosmoplastic or Stoical Atheism supposes one plastic but senseless nature to preside over the whole corporeal universe and lastly the Hylozoic or Stratonical attributes to all matter as such a certain living and energetic nature but devoid of all animality sense and consciousness goes quote he calls this latter system Stratonical as being derived from Straton of Lampsicus a philosopher of the third century before Christ footnote tutor of Ptolemy Philadelphus and supposed by some a precursor of Spinoza end of footnote it is needless to point out the identity of the fundamental conception in all these systems matter is conceived in all as possessed of a certain independent activity capable of generating or developing the world evolution is the underlying idea of all whereas mechanism or construction is the special idea of the democratic system and according to the confession of Cudworth himself all atheistic speculation may be reduced to these two main types the one of which seeks to explain everything by accidental combinations of matter and motion and the other by the conception of matter as in itself living active and capable of endless development into higher forms of being the one may be said to bring us ultimately in face of an atom or mere point of matter the other before some vague conception of material life or force even this distinction disappears in the last analysis and leaves us only a general conception of a law of origin or primal activity out of which all being comes the essential question concerns the character of this law in the last resort is it material or spiritual is the primal force any form of matter or is it mind is mind first or second or in Cudworth's language senior or junior and is the world to be conceived as matter plus mind or mind plus matter the whole question comes at length to this and no one has ever more clearly apprehended or more distinctly put the issue than the author of the true intellectual system of the universe he saw in full light but so many theistic thinkers have taken so long to see that the subordinate conception of construction or evolution of an act or process of origin is of no vital moment theism is no more essentially involved in the one conception than the other and just as there have been theistic atomists there have been theistic hylozoists the hylozoist who, quote, professes to hold a deity and a rational soul immortal is not to be taken for a mere disguised atheist or counterfeit historical theist, close quote hylozoism or atomism by themselves are merely modes of conceiving the order of things or the formation of the world they are only atheistic when combined with corporealism in other words when they exclude mind from its place in nature as the prime source and ruler of all and acknowledge no other substance besides body or matter the essence of atheism in short is the displacement of mind from its position at the head of nature the subordination of mind to matter as its outcome and highest flower of development rather than its maker and governor all atheism is materialism or as Cudworth calls it corporealism it denies the independent existence and supreme character of mind and leaves us face to face not with intelligence but with a mere vague force which is capable of growing into intelligence has into any other force of cosmic activity Cudworth insists over and over again upon this final view of the question and directs all the force of his argument under its pressure to an attempt to establish the distinction and supremacy of mind in the universe the genuine theist he says is he who makes the first original of all things universally to be a consciously understanding nature or perfect mind now he remarks elsewhere there are two grand opinions opposite to one another the one of which contends that the first principle of all things is senseless matter the other that quote the only unmade thing and principal cause and original of all other things was not senseless matter but a perfect conscious understanding nature or mind and these are they who are strictly improperly called theists who affirm that a perfectly conscious understanding being a mind existing of itself from all eternity was the cause of all other things and they on the contrary who derive all things from senseless matter as the first original are those that are properly called atheists where for the true and genuine idea of god in general is this a perfect conscious understanding being or mind existing of itself from eternity and the cause of all other things close quote again he says quote all atheists are mere corporealists for as there was never any yet known who asserting corporeal substance did deny a deity so neither can there be any reason why he that admits the former should exclude the latter close quote thus broadly does cudworth lay down the distinction between a theistic and atheistic theory of the universe this is what he means by the true intellectual system of the universe the recognition of mind or spiritual intelligence at the head of all things as their original source and supreme governor that on the other hand is a false or atheistic system which under whatever form recognizes material nature as originating and containing its own development the first word of the one system is mind the second matter the only word of the other is matter of which mind is regarded as merely one of the manifestations or evolutions this is the ultimate issue to which thought comes on the subject but in order more fully and punctually to declare the true idea of god cudworth adverts to quote a certain opinion of some philosophers who went as it were in the middle betwixt both the former and neither made matter alone nor god the sole principle of all things but joined them both together and held two first principles or self-existent unmade beings independent upon one another god and the matter close quote this middle opinion he ascribes to the stoics on the authority of cicero pleutarch and others he does not think however that it is fairly attributed to Aristotle or to the neoplatonists notwithstanding that these philosophers asserted the eternity of the world the independent existence of matter and its eternity are not to be confounded those who maintain two self-existent principles god and matter he pronounces imperfect theists for there may be he says quote a latitude allowed in theism and though in a strict and proper sense they be only theists who acknowledge one god perfectly omnipotent the soul original of all things and as well the cause of matter as of anything else yet it seems reasonable that such consideration should be had of the infirmity of human understandings as to extend the word further that it may comprehend within it those also who assert one intellectual principle self-existent from eternity the framer and governor of the whole world though not the creator of the matter and that none should be condemned for absolute atheists merely because they hold eternal uncreated matter unless they also deny an eternal unmade mind ruling over the matter and so make senseless matter the soul original of all things close quote having thus laid down the essential basis of the idea of god he shows how it includes not only infinite power and knowledge or in other words omnipotence and omniscience but above all infinite good or love knowledge and power alone he says quote will not make a god for god is generally conceived by all to be a most venerable and most desirable being whereas an omniscient and omnipotent arbitrary deity that hath nothing either of benignity or morality in its nature to measure and regulate its will as it could not be truly august and venerable so neither could it be desirable it being that which could only be feared and dreaded close quote love therefore the very idea or essence of the good must be added to power and knowledge in order to give us the true conception of the divine a conclusion for which cut worth appeals in his usual manner to the authority of Plato and the Hebrew Kabbalists who quote make a sephira in the deity superior both to beena and hochma understanding and wisdom which they call heather or the crown close quote it is at this point of his exposition that the question of the divine unity comes before him and having started this question he runs off into a prolonged disquisition as to the true and genuine sense of the pagan polytheism it had been argued quote that this opinion of monarchy or of one supreme god the maker and governor of all hath no foundation in nature nor in the genuine ideas and proletcies of men's minds but is a mere artificial thing owing its original holy to private fancies and conceits or to positive laws and institutions amongst jews christians and mohammatans close quote this if well founded was a formidable objection to the truth of the divine unity for one of the fundamental principles of the philosophy of the Cambridge school was that all true divine ideas as all other ideas were so far innate coincident with the natural anticipations even when transcending the actual discovery of the human mind if polytheism therefore rather than monotheism was the natural expression of the mind in religion and the monotheistic stage was only reached by artificial means the influence of a special culture or special authority this constituted an obvious difficulty were it found true that pagan nations generally worshipped a multitude of self-existent and independent deities acknowledging no sovereign newman this he says would much have stumbled the naturality of the divine idea it was with the view of a soiling of this difficulty so formidable at first sight that he entered into the whole subject of pagan theology and sought to trace the hidden monotheism underlying its polytheistic modes of expression we shall not follow our author in this digression the subject of ancient beliefs and of the growth of religious ideas has passed into a new phase with the advance of historical criticism and whatever may now be thought of our author's conclusion quote that the pagan theologies all along acknowledged one sovereign and independent deity from which all their other gods regenerated close quote there are no modern students who would consider it of any serious importance in its bearing on the general question of theism for were it granted that polytheism was the natural religion of man everywhere and that the course of religious thought as modern inquiry tends to show has been upwards from the rudest nature worship to a monotheism more or less pure instead of the pagan religions being according to the old view distortions and popular corruptions of an original revelation the fact nevertheless remains that monotheism represents the higher growth of reason and civilization in all countries and this fact surely that man everywhere with the advance of thought and the general improvement of his nature outgrows the polytheistic instincts in which worship begins must be held to be a clear proof that the monotheistic idea is natural as natural certainly as any other growth or discovery of the human reason in regard to the divine passing therefore from this topic and also in the meantime from our author's discussion of the Christian and platonic trinities we shall follow up as briefly as we can his defensive theism in his concluding chapter here as everywhere he so mixes up his argument with endless replies to objections that it is extremely difficult to disentangle its main thread he is very anxious as he says not to dissemble any of the atheists strength and so he parades all their most colorable pretenses against the idea of God with a view of exposing their folly and invalidity there are first of all objections to the idea itself already so far explained and vindicated these objections are set forth and elaborately refuted in the first section of the chapter then there is a series of special objections as to the impossibility of creation out of nothing the nature of spiritual or incorporeal existence the phenomena of motion and cogitation and finally the difficulties of providence all of which are treated in separate sections from this mass of laborious argumentation we shall endeavor to extract the most distinctive principles end of chapter four part three